QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM SAN SEBASTIAN

Just Jaeckin’s 1974 Emmanuelle inserted sexual frankness and eroticism into French cinema, at a time in history when the film industry was beginning to flirt with sexually explicit representations (Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris and Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat had been made just two years earlier). Audrey Diwan’s eponymous reboot does precisely the opposite: the kills any possibility of sensuality and sexual fulfilment at one of the most sexless moments in recent history of film. It is the nail in the coffin of eroticism.

Our protagonist Emmanuelle Arnaud is played by Noémie Merlant. Instead of Bangkok, the action takes place in a luxury hotel in Hong Kong. And instead of being married, Emmanuelle is a single French woman working on a report of the high-end hospitality facilities. A guest reassures her: “those who come here are either on the prowl or on the run”. She has a quick masturbational encounter with a young literature student, who the hotel owner (Naomi Watts) suspects might be in fact an escort. And she becomes obsessed with a mysterious Kei (Will Sharpe), a guest who never sleeps in his room. He claims that he’s an engineer working on water dams. She suspects that his undertakings are much darker and the deeper than such concrete structures, and thus begins to stalk him. Then a massive storm throws everything into disarray.

The scarce and sparse sex scenes boast neither vigour nor enthusiasm. Merlant is robotic: she conveys no pleasure and emotion. She makes masturbation look painful, almost like self-torture. It’s almost as if someone was punishing her (against her will, not as part of sex games). These scenes are not a riff on objectification of women and sexual ennui. They are intended to be sexy. The narrated sexual encounters are just as contrived. This is not Bibi Andersson describing a threesome with two strangers on the beach, in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). Emmanuelle delivers the details of her sexual encounters with the fervour of a real estate agent selling a converted council flat in Dagenham. There is no spark of joy in her eyes, no sweat in her hands, and no sass in her voice. And there is no spontaneity. This is sex entirely stripped of impertinence and impudence.

At one point, a male lover asks Emmanuelle for her consent during a threesome. She responds: “do you want me to do it?”. The man offers his rejoinder with #MeToo didacticism: “only if you want it”. Next time, they should ask Emmanuelle to fill out a form. Presumably, that’s the only way to ensure that every single move is consensual: “Kiss in the mouth?”, “Tick!”, “Take off underwear?”, “Tick!”, “Lick nipple?”, “Tick!”, “Double finger in the a**e?”, “God forbid!!!”.

There is absolutely nothing to be enjoyed in this 103-minute drama from France. In addition to the lack of eroticism, there is no humour, no cheek, no sassiness, no Camp, no wit, no twist, and no significant takeaway. The fact that the dirty cigarette and the “smoking vagina” of the 1974 classic are here replaced with an ice cube has an unintentional symbolism. The “feminist” Emmanuele is ice cold and insipid.

I welcome that a woman filmmaker should insert the female gaze into an erotic classic infused with male desire and sensibility. But I do not applaud that she should sanitise it to point of obliteration. This is a movie so mechanic and over-scripted that you can barely savour the various ingredients. Much like over-processed food that tastes of nothing, and then leaves you with a tummy ache.

Emmanuelle just opened the 72nd edition of the San Sebastian International Film Festival.